6 ms·

This is because the technical interview has completely degenerated into an arms race. It started with good intentions. It used to be just, here's a problem, t

This is because the technical interview has completely degenerated into an arms race. It started with good intentions. It used to be just, here's a problem, try to solve it and let's discuss. And at first it was fine. But then knowing Big-O, algorithm, data structure, etc. became a way to "show off" and impress the interviewer. So everyone started to focus on those to impress the interviewer. Then the interviewers noticed and started to state they would only be impressed by more and more obscure algorithms and data structures. And then the real downward spiral began with the publication of Cracking the Coding Interview. More books were published, a whole industry to support this. Then came the sites like leetcode and HackerRank. Now there's a lot of money supporting and pushing for continuing this stupid process. And the arms race just keeps getting worse and worse. The interviewers expect more and more obscure algorithms and data structures and justify it with "must avoid false positives". This just increases the study time for candidates and they're willing to spend time and money to do it. And the tech interview industry (all the books and sites) are happy to push this arms race since it's more money for them. Now they have enough money to go openly defend the tech interview as the "best practice". It's not even enough to get the right answer now. You have to do it fast enough or you fail. And now they care about syntax on a whiteboard. None of this used to be true. It all started as a way to see how you approach a problem and discussing it. No expectations that you would correctly get Algorithm ABC and Data Structure XYZ. No expectation that the syntax is correct, pseudo code was ok. No expectation even on a complete working solution, the point was just to see if you can reason about the problem. All that is gone, replaced by the tech interview arms race. Now it's just a massive speed pattern matching contest to see if you've studied enough to hopefully cover the obscure problem the interviewer will pick and if you can correctly pattern match in time based on the hundreds of questions you did on leetcode. Completely useless and against the original intent of tech interviews.

kls 10y ago
I postulate that false negatives are far more expensive, in a constricted talent pool. We keep seeing the adage that false positives are expensive but honestly if one cannot spot a false positive within 30 days of engagement with that person, then the hiring person should really contemplate their expertise in the field. I saw a really good write up (I think on here) where they basically did a initial "are you an idiot?" round of interviews and then contracted every person that they thought might be a viable (not good just viable) candidate with a small piece of software for 2 weeks. This amounted to 3 candidates IIRC the TL;DR was that the person they thought was least likely to perform knocked their socks off. The one that crushed the interview asked for more time and then just fell of the radar. The technical code test and trick question interview is a tired fingerprint of the industry. Honestly if one cannot spot technical talent by having a 30 minute conversation with a person, they may want to reassess where they think they are in their own technical and managerial skills, because they may want to reflect the possibility that they are engaging in a weiner waving contest as opposed to an interview, to stroke their own ego.
- Klockan 10y ago
  Imagine that you passed your dream job interview, you pack you things and move to another state! 30 days into the new job you get the news, you are fired for being a low performer! You go online and post about your experiences, how horrible this company is for not looking out for their employees. You get a lot of responses saying that they have experiences the same, a large part of new hires are fired within the first month at this company! Now tell me, do you think that said company will get many quality applicants in the future? At least I prefer harsh interviews and then being relatively safe compared to the reverse.
  - kls 10y ago
    I did not go into deep detail about the article because I did not want to misquote it but my understanding was that they sent the prospects a VM with the entire dev environment running. Gave them a simple but real task that they needed accomplished and remote contracted them to complete that task (with compensation). They (the prospective developer) were given a full software spec, and access to the development team. They did track the time the team spent with the developer and did review the returned code. At worst it was a side gig with some income for the two week. IIRC 9K to each candidate whether completed or not. The way the process was structured was so that there was little risk to the applicant. The whole experiment was to expose their companies bias in the hiring process and the summation was they found it eye opening.
    - cardine 10y ago
      People keep talking about doing these "trial" periods but the people I want to hire are the type of people who have enough options that they wouldn't agree to do some two week trial period when they have four other companies offering them a full time job with no strings attached. I wish I could do paid trial periods for everyone, I just think this will filter out far more people than having a restrictive interview process that works specifically to filter out false positives. So with a paid trial you will generally filter out the best people who have other options while a more restrictive interview process would generally filter out the worst people who couldn't make it past a difficult Skype interview and a difficult onsite two hour pair coding session.
rjbwork 10y ago
> But then knowing Big-O, algorithm, data structure, etc. became a way to "show off" and impress the interviewer How is knowing the very basics of CS a way to show-off? It should be requisite shouldn't it? That said, I agree with the degeneration to arms race. I'm awaiting an interview question on Shor's algorithm. "We like to be ready for whatever the future may bring here at LolCorp."
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  How often, in your day job, is it a necessary job-related task for you to be pop-quizzed on the Big-O characteristics of half a dozen data structures and then have to draw out manipulations of a binary tree on a whiteboard? Somehow we decided to never test for the things we actually do at work, and instead to invent an entirely new discipline (whiteboard interviewing) and test for competence at that, in hopes it would translate to doing well on the job. Thus far the empirical evidence is not particularly great that testing for the skill of whiteboard interviewing translates to success on the job, and there's a growing body of evidence that it excludes the most desirable people (since experienced high-quality candidates are likely to have been out of school, or whatever they used to learn "fundamentals", for long enough that the things tested in a whiteboard interview are not close enough to the top of their minds to consistently pass).
  - rjbwork 10y ago
    I mean, I think the whiteboard thing is pretty lame, and would prefer to give and get coding tests on my own machine and environment. But yeah, I expect someone to be able to tell me what the complexity of various algorithms when shown them is and how to manipulate common data structures. At the very least one ought to be able to walk a tree don't you think? My front end engineer has to walk a tree of JSON on a project right now. I'm glad she can do it.
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      And yet... this attitude is how we get stuff like the Homebrew guy tweeting that Google is happy to be internally dependent on his software while also saying he's not qualified to write software for Google, because their tech interview excludes him. (Google's interview process, in my experience, can be gamed heavily by just memorizing a dynamic-programming solution to the longest-common-subsequence problem; they love popping that one out in interviews, even for job descriptions which have no reasonable need to ever be able to regurgitate it onto a whiteboard on command)
ndesaulniers 10y ago
I like your imagery of a downward spiral. Other industries have higher costs for employment and pay less. For example, teachers often have to spend thousands of dollars out of pocket to take tests to get various levels of certification just to start teaching. I'm afraid our industry is moving in the same direction. It will start becoming more and more expensive just to get the damn job. It's already hard enough. Soon all costs of training an employee will be pushed off onto the employee themselves. "You must be able to jump this high (and spent $$$) to work here."

kls 10y ago

I postulate that false negatives are far more expensive, in a constricted talent pool. We keep seeing the adage that false positives are expensive but honestly if one cannot spot a false positive within 30 days of engagement with that person, then the hiring person should really contemplate their expertise in the field. I saw a really good write up (I think on here) where they basically did a initial "are you an idiot?" round of interviews and then contracted every person that they thought might be a viable (not good just viable) candidate with a small piece of software for 2 weeks. This amounted to 3 candidates IIRC the TL;DR was that the person they thought was least likely to perform knocked their socks off. The one that crushed the interview asked for more time and then just fell of the radar. The technical code test and trick question interview is a tired fingerprint of the industry. Honestly if one cannot spot technical talent by having a 30 minute conversation with a person, they may want to reassess where they think they are in their own technical and managerial skills, because they may want to reflect the possibility that they are engaging in a weiner waving contest as opposed to an interview, to stroke their own ego.

Klockan 10y ago
Imagine that you passed your dream job interview, you pack you things and move to another state! 30 days into the new job you get the news, you are fired for being a low performer! You go online and post about your experiences, how horrible this company is for not looking out for their employees. You get a lot of responses saying that they have experiences the same, a large part of new hires are fired within the first month at this company! Now tell me, do you think that said company will get many quality applicants in the future? At least I prefer harsh interviews and then being relatively safe compared to the reverse.
- kls 10y ago
  I did not go into deep detail about the article because I did not want to misquote it but my understanding was that they sent the prospects a VM with the entire dev environment running. Gave them a simple but real task that they needed accomplished and remote contracted them to complete that task (with compensation). They (the prospective developer) were given a full software spec, and access to the development team. They did track the time the team spent with the developer and did review the returned code. At worst it was a side gig with some income for the two week. IIRC 9K to each candidate whether completed or not. The way the process was structured was so that there was little risk to the applicant. The whole experiment was to expose their companies bias in the hiring process and the summation was they found it eye opening.
  - cardine 10y ago
    People keep talking about doing these "trial" periods but the people I want to hire are the type of people who have enough options that they wouldn't agree to do some two week trial period when they have four other companies offering them a full time job with no strings attached. I wish I could do paid trial periods for everyone, I just think this will filter out far more people than having a restrictive interview process that works specifically to filter out false positives. So with a paid trial you will generally filter out the best people who have other options while a more restrictive interview process would generally filter out the worst people who couldn't make it past a difficult Skype interview and a difficult onsite two hour pair coding session.

rjbwork 10y ago

> But then knowing Big-O, algorithm, data structure, etc. became a way to "show off" and impress the interviewer How is knowing the very basics of CS a way to show-off? It should be requisite shouldn't it? That said, I agree with the degeneration to arms race. I'm awaiting an interview question on Shor's algorithm. "We like to be ready for whatever the future may bring here at LolCorp."

ubernostrum 10y ago
How often, in your day job, is it a necessary job-related task for you to be pop-quizzed on the Big-O characteristics of half a dozen data structures and then have to draw out manipulations of a binary tree on a whiteboard? Somehow we decided to never test for the things we actually do at work, and instead to invent an entirely new discipline (whiteboard interviewing) and test for competence at that, in hopes it would translate to doing well on the job. Thus far the empirical evidence is not particularly great that testing for the skill of whiteboard interviewing translates to success on the job, and there's a growing body of evidence that it excludes the most desirable people (since experienced high-quality candidates are likely to have been out of school, or whatever they used to learn "fundamentals", for long enough that the things tested in a whiteboard interview are not close enough to the top of their minds to consistently pass).
- rjbwork 10y ago
  I mean, I think the whiteboard thing is pretty lame, and would prefer to give and get coding tests on my own machine and environment. But yeah, I expect someone to be able to tell me what the complexity of various algorithms when shown them is and how to manipulate common data structures. At the very least one ought to be able to walk a tree don't you think? My front end engineer has to walk a tree of JSON on a project right now. I'm glad she can do it.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    And yet... this attitude is how we get stuff like the Homebrew guy tweeting that Google is happy to be internally dependent on his software while also saying he's not qualified to write software for Google, because their tech interview excludes him. (Google's interview process, in my experience, can be gamed heavily by just memorizing a dynamic-programming solution to the longest-common-subsequence problem; they love popping that one out in interviews, even for job descriptions which have no reasonable need to ever be able to regurgitate it onto a whiteboard on command)

ndesaulniers 10y ago

I like your imagery of a downward spiral. Other industries have higher costs for employment and pay less. For example, teachers often have to spend thousands of dollars out of pocket to take tests to get various levels of certification just to start teaching. I'm afraid our industry is moving in the same direction. It will start becoming more and more expensive just to get the damn job. It's already hard enough. Soon all costs of training an employee will be pushed off onto the employee themselves. "You must be able to jump this high (and spent $$$) to work here."